Phila. Educator to Lead Chester Upland

By Dan Hardy, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Jul. 20–Gregory Thornton, for the last three years the chief academic officer of the 174,000-student Philadelphia School District, will be the new schools superintendent in Delaware County’s struggling Chester Upland district, where enrollment is less than one-fortieth the city’s.

The announcement came at Chester Upland’s board meeting last night; Thornton will be hired next week and start Aug. 1, district officials said.

The Philadelphia district has 263 schools, 63 of them high schools; Chester Upland has one high school and seven schools in all, with total regular-school enrollment of 4,250. And Philadelphia’s budget is more than $2 billion, while Chester Upland’s is $94.5 million.

Thornton is the second high-ranking Philadelphia schools official to take another job in the region since the district’s chief executive, Paul Vallas, departed for New Orleans a month ago. This week, Bessie LeFra Young became the superintendent in Camden; she had been a Philadelphia regional superintendent.

Thornton said last night that the small size of the Chester Upland district “is the main reason” he wanted to go there. “It contains the opportunity to do some great things for kids,” he said.

And because he graduated from Overbrook High School in Philadelphia and knows the area well, he added, “I’m home, with Chester being so close.”

Thornton succeeds Gloria Grantham, whose two years included higher test scores, especially in the elementary grades. But fights and poor academic performance continued to plague Chester High School, and charter schools grew to enroll close to 40 percent of all students in the district and about half of all students in kindergarten through eighth grade.

Though the state-appointed board of control that runs the district put a cap on charter enrollment this year, winning the confidence of parents and drawing children back to the regular public schools is sure to be one of Thornton’s main challenges.

Thornton will be paid $205,000; his salary this year in Philadelphia was $195,700.

Grantham, who was paid $160,000 last school year, remained popular with many parents and community activists. She resigned this year, saying the new board of control should pick its own superintendent.

Charles Warren, the leader of a parent and community group that has worked for better schools, said in an interview that the board had not “proved to me that there was a need for a new superintendent. We already had a good superintendent.”

Thornton said he was up to the challenge of proving himself in Chester Upland.

“I want the accountability,” he said. “What they want for the children are the same things I want.”

Contact staff writer Dan Hardy

at 610-701-7638 or dhardy@phillynews.com.

—–

To see more of The Philadelphia Inquirer, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.philly.com.

Copyright (c) 2007, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.